In preparation for the May release of the movie version of another book in the “Chronicles of Narnia” fantasy series, publisher HarperCollins has launched an integrated campaign to “Read It before You See It,” using viral marketing and social media to encourage readers to pick up the text before they pick up tickets.
The initiative is meant to create buzz around “Prince Caspian,” the fourth installment in the seven-book Narnia series penned by C.S. Lewis some 50 years ago. The volume will also appear on the big screen May 16 as a live-action movie from Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media.
Compared to its marketing around the first Narnia film, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” back in 2005, the publisher’s effort this time is a much more full-featured online promotion, including widgets on both MySpace and Facebook, a Prince Caspian microsite, and branding on other Web sites that attract young people.
“This is an online viral campaign that didn’t exist for the first movie,” said Diane Naughton, marketing vice president for HarperCollins Children’s Books. “Our core audience of middle-grade readers live online in a big way, so creating a whole campaign with interactive elements that could take us from March through the movie release in May seemed the best way to get as much buzz as possible about the book property and the movie.”
Those elements include a microsite for the Narnia series at http://www.harpercollinschildrens.com/narnia featuring information about the books, links to the movie site and to its trailer video, and information about a sweepstakes drawing offering a pair of tickets to the New York premiere of “Prince Caspian” as a grand prize. Other awards in the random drawing include a “Narnia treasure chest” of toys, games and other merchandise (first prize), a complete set of “Prince Caspian” movie tie-in books (second prize), and a “prince Caspian” video game for the Wii console (third prize).
The HarperCollins microsite also offers a shareable “Prince Caspian” widget, developed by Clearspring, that fans can place on their Web profile pages including on Facebook and MySpace. The mini-app provides a countdown to the movie launch, a Narnia trivia game with scorekeeper, an on-board viewer for the current movie trailer (with other video content to come) and links to the movie site and the HarperCollins microsite. Widget users can also click through the tool to buy “Prince Caspian” from a list of suggested online booksellers that HarperCollins connects to.
Within the Facebook social network, another trivia game will let fans “join the battle” with Prince Caspian, taking on the identity of a favorite character from the series and challenge their friends to answer 100 trivia questions about the books. Providing the correct answers unlocks more content, including wallpapers and buddy icons relating to the book and the movie.
HarperCollins will also run an interactive game on http://www.NeoPets.com, the casual gaming site aimed at pre-teens and owned by Viacom. The game will offer to identify the “Narnia” character that players most resemble in temperament. Advertising and links will drive traffic back to the microsite, movie trailers and other features.
In addition, HarperCollins Children’s Books has also signed partnership deals with third-party Web sites to promote the books and the movie. Yahoo Kids, a Web portal with 4 million unique visitors a month, will let users send e-cards to their friends purportedly from the Pevensie children, the main characters in the series.
America Online’s KOL kids’ division will conduct a “Prince Caspian” read-along, encouraging its 1.2 million unique monthly visitors to consume a chapter a week and offering prizes for correctly answering trivia based on those chapters.
“The books have a very diverse audience,” Naughton says. “So we really tried to take 50-year-old brand and bring it into Web 2.0 while addressing each of our constituencies: tween readers, teens and fans, including an adult following interested in the Narnia franchise.”
According to a HarperCollins release, tie-ins to the first Narnia movie in 2005 drove sales of more than 17 million units in the U.S. alone. “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” earned more than $750 million in worldwide sales.
Naughton said HarperCollins’ more elaborate campaign around “Prince Caspian” was planned with the knowledge that Disney is currently in pre-production on a third movie in the Narnia series, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.” That picture is set for a spring 2010 release.
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